10/26/11

Mattel announced this morning in a press conference that it would begin selling limited-use licenses to print copies of its popular toys on 3-D printers. The “Designerz” line, sold on the company’s website as a download and in stores as a DRM-protected memory stick, will allow users to print up to five copies of a toy on any commercially-available 3-D printer, including MakerBot.

A "vintage" 2010 Thing-O-Matic, photo CC-BY Bre Pettis

“We’re excited to give children around the world an opportunity to make their favorite Mattel-brand toys right in their own homes,” spokesman Matt Reich said at the conference. The first release of toy schematic files will be a tie in with Disney/Pixar’s Cars 3, which is coming to theaters this summer. The Cars 3 toy files will be released in April, with files for printing Barbie-related objects coming in August.

No official word has been given regarding pricing, but an anonymous inside source claims the licenses for the Cars 3 toys will cost $15, which will include five reprints per license.

The process requires users to install a program called “Toy Factory” which tracks the number of licenses used. While the process will involve the open AMF file format, Toy Factory will ensure that proprietary designs are not illegally copied by the user. This hasn’t gone over well with everyone, notably a consortium of MakerBot users called “The Jolly Elves”, who operate a database of free, open-source toy schematic files.

The Jolly Elves posted this statement on their homepage:

“Dozens of designers have spent thousands of hours making quality toy schematics that can be used on any 3-D printer, at any time, at no cost. Purchasing a DRM-hobbled system from a major corporation is a waste of your time and money. Teach your children to appreciate quality, not over-branding. We, the Jolly Elves, will always welcome you into our humble workshop.”

The Jolly Elves are the creators of Ballpeen, an open-source toy design tool, and have been operating since the summer of 2014.

10/24/11

Somewhere
in a Los Angeles apartment, a 21-year-old woman is interrupted in the
midst of conversation by the ping of her smartphone’s notification
system. She politely excuses herself from her party, buzzing with
excitement over what she expects to see on her device—and there it is:
an otherwise unidentifiable is.gd-shortened
link. She races home to her laptop, clicks open her browser and reads.
She is one of the lucky few and she knows it. She is on the Secret Site
Listserv. She is, as they call themselves, a “Siter”.

This
young lady (we’ll call her Amber), who spoke to Dispatches on condition
of anonymity, received her first Secret Site email last November. The
introduction to the listserv was short and sweet: “You, Amber [last
name], are one of the lucky few identified as important enough to
receive an invitation to discover things that will be popular tomorrow.
The art, culture, politics, science, and technology found in these links
is mostly unknown today, but will soon explode onto the scene. You are
among those privileged to be the first to know.”

The
links to the Secret Sites are actually links to entries on a site
called Quick Forget, a favorite site for sharers of clandestine
information. The links from Quick Forget disappear forever after they’re
viewed, and the pages themselves appear to be on randomly generated IP
Addresses. These pages all look the same: Clean, gray text on a dark
blue background, each with a bold, unhelpful title: Dump, Repository,
Heap, Stuff, etc.

Amber
recounts her first experience with the Secret Sites: “I was sure this
was some kind of prank or marketing pitch or something, but of course I
couldn’t help myself. The creepy part was the email was right—all the
stuff I saw on the site was stuff I’d never heard of, but within, like, a
month, I saw all of it on the news or on Twitter or Facebook,” she told
us.

At
the beginning, Amber recalls, she was worried about sharing the
information from the secret sites—she was afraid that if the Sender
(Siters tend to capitalize “Sender”) found out that she was spilling
information, she would be cut off from the listserv.

“I
found a forum one time, in the comments section of an article I saw about the Site, just for Siters. I went on and found out there were dozens of
us. It freaked me out. All I could think was ‘What if the Sender finds
this, you guys?’ A couple of weeks later the forum had been taken down,
and I was just glad I never posted on it. I don’t want to lose my
connection.”

The
desire to share, however, beat out her initial fears, and she’s begun
posting content from the Site on her Twitter feed. She says she has no
idea why the Sender chose her specifically: “I’m just a normal college
student. There’s nothing interesting about me, and I only have, like, 200
Twitter followers. I’ve never been famous or even really that popular.”

The
Site information she shares, however, has made a few waves. Amber tells
the story of when one of her posts was retweeted by a major political
commentator: “So, I posted a Reuters story about the French Parliament
talking about lifting the burqa ban. The Site said that the ban would be
lifted before the end of the month, so that’s what I posted. And this
guy, [name redacted], who I later found out was pretty famous, RTed me
and said something like ‘Wishful thinking, friend.’ And then, two weeks later they
voted and the ban was over.”

Dispatches
has contacted dozens of leads in the pursuit of this story, and all of
them except Amber have led down the same two paths: the supposed Siters
we’ve contacted turned out to be frauds or dupes, or real Siters we’ve
reached out to have been flatly unwilling to talk to the media. And they
all have the same reason: The Sender.

Nobody
knows who the Sender could be, and if curious Siters have any
clues, they aren’t sharing them with anyone. A recent Wired post suggests a
few likely suspects: SEO companies experimenting with secret branding,
political parties, internet entrepreneurs, or even governmental
organizations. But no one has a solid lead.

“I
have no clue,” said Amber when we asked her, “but whoever it is is pretty damned smart.”

10/21/11

In
April, we reported on the recently-spotted “English” virus, a computer
bug that appears to have escaped from somewhere in the US Northwest. We
quoted a representative from the Department of Homeland Security as
saying, “From all our analysis and the analysis of independent security
groups, we’re guessing that the English Trojan is aiming at building a
botnet of unparalleled size.”

Turns
out he was wrong. Both Symantec and McAfee have released reports within
the last two weeks that seem to show a correlation between the spread
of the virus and the drastic drop in the size of international botnets.
Even the two largest active botnets, Conficker and SuperHi, have
suffered devastating losses.

Marko Numminen of Avira Operations, the group that produces the free
anti-virus software of the same name, said, “[English] appears to be
downloading an anti-virus payload—it’s not any of the commercially
available products out there, so we’re guessing the virus writer created
his or her own anti-viral product and is using that to clean machines
that would otherwise be under control of a botnet master.”

Officials
from Symantec have warned that while English (also known as
FastEnglish, UK_EN, and White Knight) has been damaged botnets around
the world, the extent of its payload is unknown. “It may just be
clearing the field for an even bigger botnet later down the road,” said
Stacia Wilkie, a member of Symantec’s New Trojan Working Group. “If you
suspect you’ve been infected by English, we recommend downloading any
one of the free removal tools available from us or any other respectable
computer security organization.” Dispatches has a list of removal tools here.

Numminen
further indicated that English doesn’t spell the end of botnets
forever—botnet masters will certainly fight back against the bloc of
English-protected computers, which he calls the “notnet”. It’s unclear
whether the anti-virus behind the notnet will be able to keep pace with
the most virulent computer infections of our time, but one thing is for
sure: With hundreds of millions of virus-infected computers on networks
around the world, the stakes could not be higher.

New
Mexico Governor Jim Garcia revealed a blockbuster of an energy plan
this morning to a crowd of investors and energy company executives
congregated at the State House. The plan would call for unprecedented
modifications of land use in the state along with the sale of energy
bonds, investments from foreign and domestic sources, and applications
for US renewable energy grants, to facilitate an innovation contest with a
massive grand prize.

Photo by Lynn Rosentrater, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

The
Southwest Electrical Energy Technology Initiative, or the SWEET
Initiative for short, leverages the Land of Enchantment’s massive swath
of unpopulated sun-drenched desert, small patch of windmill-ready land,
and progressive state government in an attempt to produce 42 million
gigawatt-hours of energy a year starting in 2025. In 2016, that number
would have accounted for about 9% of total US electricity usage.

“We
plan for the SWEET Initiative to revolutionize the State of New Mexico,
bringing much-needed jobs, lowering the price of power, revitalizing
our infrastructure, and showing the country—and the world—that
sustainable energy production is not only possible but practical and
profitable,” said Mr. Garcia in this morning’s meeting.

The
plan calls for land to be made available for three companies or
consortia of companies based on the results of a contest in which
low-cost, renewable energy production facilities are judged by a panel
of experts on cost-effectiveness, impact on the environment, and
long-term sustainability. The three winning plans will be given prize
monies and gifted land for building—up to one-twelfth of the state’s
footprint, if necessary.

Jane Ketterer, head of the US Renewable Energy Association, applauded the
move. “It’s high time states and counties got involved in renewable
energy in a serious way. The SWEET Initiative should be taken as a model
by all states with significant green energy production capacities.”

Not
everyone, of course, is on board. Brittany Wheeler, Senate Minority
Leader for the State Senate held a press conference to express GOP
dissent from the plan. “Time and time again, the Democratic Party has
shown that it has no respect for the average working American. This
plan, if it doesn’t make New Mexico a national laughingstock, will
bankrupt local power producers, kill jobs, and raise taxes on those who
can’t afford them. [The New Mexico GOP] will stand firm against this
bitter pill being forced down the throats of New Mexicans and will work
to repeal it.”

The
deadline for the facility design contest is January 6, 2019, the
state’s 107th birthday and the date of the next projected solar eclipse.
Many of the designs submitted are expected to include solar thermal
tower plants, solar panel farms, and wind farms. Other possible
solutions include urban and highway piezoelectric generation and
graphene-enabled solar harvesting.

10/20/11

An independent research organization is setting out to build a roadmap of social media information flows.

Jon Shackleford, former online political organizer and open-source software
guru, has turned his attention to a more academic pursuit: finding out
just how information travels down that series of tubes we’ve all come to
depend on. His new group, Internet Influence Analysts, was formed in
May 2013 and announced this flagship project just after New Year’s Day.

The
group’s press release indicates that the project, called the
Independent Social Media Audit, or ISMA, will pick up where previous
studies and services left off, by attempting to identify what IIA calls
“covert influencers”—people with little or no name recognition who
nonetheless make huge impacts on the content that propagates through
social media networks. IIA has named Dr. Li Junbao of MIT to head the
project, and is in negotiations with DataFarms, a Colorado Springs-based
datacenter contractor, to house the ISMA servers.

Shackleford
told Dispatches via email, “The point of this project isn’t to find the
next Maria Popova or Cory Doctorow. This is all about finding people
who are under the radar, but who end up drastically changing the
narrative two or three steps down the chain. It’s about finding that
butterfly in India that makes a hurricane hit Miami.”

IIA
has not indicated what it will do with the data it collects from its
target social media sources, primarily Twitter, along with specialty SM
like Pinterest, Instagram, GitHub, and Netroil. Should the project
succeed and the data be made available for purchase, Shackleford and
crew will certainly make a healthy profit on this information.

The project is slated for completion in early 2015. No budget has been released by IIA.